The Magic Spectacles (2 page)

(Chapter 2 continues after illustration)

“Let’s eat,” Danny said suddenly. “I want some pancakes. How much money do we have?”

“Enough,” John said. Although what he was thinking was something more like, “Enough to buy that fishbowl full of marbles in the window.” Then he looked at the fisherman on the cover of the book again. He had the same face and hair as the man on the moon coin….

Maybe later they would come back for the marbles. Right now pancakes seemed like a better idea.

At Watson’s lunch counter they took a table by the window so that they could see people walk past out on the sidewalk. It wasn’t cold out, but it was blustery, and the wind made people clutch their coats around them as if it were going to blow the coats off and sail them over the rooftops like kites. A man raced past chasing a hat, and another man, right behind him, hurried along backwards so that the wind blew his coat shut instead of open. He had the goggly eyes of the fish on the moon coin, and John nearly pointed this out to Danny, but he stopped himself. Maybe he was getting fish on the brain.

Neither of them said very much while they were eating their pancakes, and finally John pushed his empty plate away. He had finished his cocoa, too. There was nothing left in his cup but a sort of brown paste. He took four crumpled dollar bills from his pocket, and Danny dug out two more and a handful of change. They counted out the coins, heaping them on top of the bills, making sure there was enough and with some left over for a tip.

Then Danny took the moon coin out of his pocket and turned it over in his hand, looking first at one side and then at the other. Outside, the wind stopped blowing. Flying leaves drifted to the street. People let go of their coats and pulled their collars straight.

Silently, John picked up his spoon, licked it, and stuck it carefully to his nose, so that the handle hung down over his chin like one of the screwball beards that the Egyptian Pharaohs used to wear. He leaned across the table and waited for Danny to look up….

… and right then he realized that someone was watching him through the window. He jumped in surprise. The spoon flipped off his nose, clattering down into Danny’s half-full water glass. Water splashed on the table, and John had to grab the glass to keep it from falling over.

“Hey!” Danny said, looking up. “What are you doing? I was going to drink that.

“Nothing,” John said. With his eyes he gestured toward the street.

Standing just outside the window was a little man in an old green coat. He was about as big as a dwarf or an elf, and there was bundle of sticks in a bag over his shoulder. His face was wrinkled and pinched, like the face of the moon. He took a pointed cloth cap from his pocket and pulled it on. People walked past without looking at him, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about him at all.

Or perhaps as if they simply couldn’t see him.

He winked at John and Danny very slowly, tipped his hat, and turned away.

The wind blew again, harder than ever. It swept a storm of leaves down the center of the street. The little man held onto his hat with both hands, and, as if he were made of paper, the wind whisked him away through the air, straight across the Plaza, past the fountain, and in through the door of the curiosity shop.

As he watched the little man depart in a whirl of leaves, John realized that he had seen him before that morning….

It had been almost two months ago, right at the end of summer, in the week before school started. John and Danny had broken their bedroom window while playing baseball on the front lawn. There had been nothing left of the window but shattered glass all over the bedroom floor. Somehow, even the wooden frame of the window was knocked to pieces, and anyone could see that it wouldn’t do just to put in another piece of glass.

That’s when they got lucky, and Mrs. Owlswick down the block gave them a window. Mrs. Owlswick lived with her niece Kimberly in a big and very old house. Kimberly’s uncle, Mrs. Owlswick’s brother, had lived upstairs in the attic room. Everyone said that he had “gone away,” which was a polite way of saying he had gone crazy and one day had disappeared. Under the house, in a little cellar, Mrs. Owlswick stored odds and ends of stuff: old pieces of furniture, boxes of glass doorknobs, hinges, picture frames, clock parts, and the window, which was glazed with a ripply sort of pale green glass.

Their father very happily took the window. He said that he was “going to do the job right.” That meant that he was going to do it in the most complicated way he could, and make the job last. “Get me the pry bar,” he had said to John, and with it he had started pulling off the wall mouldings and prying out all the pieces of the old window, throwing them out onto the lawn where John and Danny dropped them into a trash barrel.

A couple of times their father had asked if the new window looked “plum”, from out there on the lawn, which didn’t make any sense at all, and so John said that the window might not look “plum”, but that it looked
peachy
. Right then their father hit his thumb with the hammer, and so he didn’t think the joke was very funny at all, and John and Danny had to go around the corner of the house in order to laugh.

Finally, late in the afternoon, he hung Mrs. Owlswick’s window in place of the old one and put the mouldings back up around it. They all came into the bedroom to have a look through it. The sun was just going down, and because of the ripply green glass, the world outside looked something like a tidepool, as if they were gazing out through shallow sea water.

It had rained the next morning. John sat on his bed, looking out at the street. Water ran in the gutter, splashing over the curb, and windy raindrops splattered against the glass. Someone with an umbrella was coming along down the sidewalk. He was small, maybe a new kid in the neighborhood. When he stopped in front of the house, John could see that he wasn’t a kid at all, but was actually a little man wearing a green cloth cap. On his back he carried a bundle of sticks. Rain poured off his umbrella in a curtain of drops.

He had stood on the sidewalk twirling his umbrella for a moment, looking at the house – or more particularly, looking at the new window, maybe looking through it. Then he walked away, past Mrs. Owlswick’s house, seeming to grow smaller and smaller as he vanished in the rainy morning air.

Now, two months later, the same little man had been looking in at them through the lunch counter window.
Something
was about to happen. John knew it. Another door was about to open, and there wasn’t going to be a new car behind this one either. More likely they’d get the clown again, along with an invitation to the circus of Dr. Wrinkle-face, where they’d be turned into fish or toads or something and kept in a cage.

They went outside and unlocked their bikes, then rode across the street again and leaned their bikes against the brick wall of the curiosity shop. John looked at the fishbowl full of marbles. They were good ones – the kind you hardly ever found. You could buy clear marbles in a plastic net bag at the market. And you could buy solid color marbles like the ones that come in a Chinese checkers game. Sometimes you found cats’ eyes in the dirt of a flowerbed, dropped there years ago by kids who are grown up now and don’t care about marbles anymore.

But the fishbowl in the window was full of the sort of marbles you could only find if you were really lucky. With the sun shining on them now, some were like swirls of frozen rootbeer. Some reminded him of tigers, or of a sunlit forest or a rainbow. Others looked like the earth seen from way off in space, as if he were sitting on the moon.

John suddenly wanted to buy them all. Marbles were like any sort of treasure; you needed a pile of them. The bigger the pile the better.

On the sign over the door was painted a picture of a man walking along a road, carrying a bundle of sticks. There was a full moon with a cheerful face in the sky above him. Under the painting were the words, “Come In.” So John pushed the door open, and he and Danny stepped through it, into the dimly-lit shop.

The shop was cool inside and full of odds and ends, all of it dusty. Stuff was piled on old tables and falling in heaps out of open wardrobes and spilling from the shelves of bookcases. Hanging from the rafters in the high ceiling was the skeleton of a giant bird held together with silver wire. There were books everywhere, all of them dark and old. There were stuffed bats and pictures of apes and clipper ships and old houses and serious looking people in bonnets and top hats. There was a jar with an enormous eye in it, and no end of old candles and silverware and crystal glasses. On the counter sat a lamp built out of an iron fish.

The little man in the green cap sat behind the counter on a tall stool. He had a book in his hand, and he peeked at John and Danny over the top of it. His bag full of tied-together sticks lay on the floor in front of the counter.

“What do you need?” he asked them. “Or more to the point, what do you
want?”
They could only see his eyes and half his nose. The rest of him was hidden by the book and the counter.

“Marbles,” John said, looking around. There was probably lots of other stuff in there he wanted too, but right now the marbles were enough. They didn’t have much money left after the pancakes.

“In the fishbowl,” Danny said. “In the window. We don’t need the glasses, though.”

The little man nodded. The point of his green cap wagged up and down. “You see very clearly, then?”

John shrugged and kicked Danny’s foot just to make sure that Danny knew how weird all this was. “I guess we just don’t want the glasses,” John said. “Just as many marbles as we can buy.”

Danny dug the rest of the change out of his pocket. “We have about a dollar,” he said.

Slowly the man’s head rose over the top of his book, until his whole face peered down at Danny’s handful of nickels and dimes. He rubbed the side of hi nose and asked, “Do you have a penny with the face of a man on it?”

“Abraham Lincoln,” Danny said.

“I was thinking of a different man, actually. The Man in the Moon.”

The wind blew so hard outside right then that it rattled the windows, and the air was full of leaves and dust. The sign over the door creaked and banged. The little man pretended to read his book again, but he watched Danny out of one eye.

For a moment John hoped that Danny wouldn’t find the moon penny. They shouldn’t have taken it from the fountain. It was connected somehow to the wind blowing outside and to autumn leaves and fish skeletons and window and sparrow sleeping in the grass.

But then Danny took it out of his pocket. He held it under the light of the iron fish lamp, and John stepped up next to him in order to get a better look.

The eyes of the moon-faced man on the coin were shut now, as if he had fallen asleep but hadn’t taken his spectacles off. John couldn’t be completely certain that his eyes had been open before, but he thought that they had been. And now, just as he looked more closely at the face, the eyes seemed to move behind their eyelids, like the eyes of a man dreaming.

The little man put his book down and took a magnifying glass out from under the counter. Except for the sound of the wind, it was ghostly silent. The shadows of leaves danced on the window pane and threw shadows across the floor. Through the magnifying glass the little man’s eye was enormous, like a whale’s eye.

“This is just what I want,” he said, nodding at them. “Moon penny. These are very rare. You don’t see one in a thousand years. I had one very much like this but I threw it into a fountain and made a wish. Are you sure you want to spend it?”

Danny didn’t say anything for a moment, as if he had swallowed something and was waiting for it to go down his throat. “Sure,” he said finally.

“I
told
you to leave it in the fountain,” John whispered.

“Take the marbles,” the little man said. “But it’s only fair to tell you that they aren’t all there; this is only some of them. They used to belong to a man, but he…lost them. Some day maybe he’ll want them back, and then you’ll have to give them up.”

(Chapter 4 continues after illustration)